The Exhibition As a Tool in the Participatory Urban Micro-Regeneretion: The Case of Puntoon Community in Guangzhou,China

Pengyu Zhao (College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University)

With the rapid expansion of Chinese cities, more and more villages, which originally located on the edge of the city, have been incorporated into the urban fabric and become so-called “urban villages”. Because of backward infrastructures and poor living environment, those urban villages have become the focus of the urban environmental renovation plan of local government in various parts of China. However, due to the social structure and property right structure of the urban village still maintain the family- based system of the traditional village, the most difficult problem is to properly satisfy the interests of varies groups of people through the environmental micro-regeneration projects. The introduction of participatory design method enables public and local people to join the design process and discuss the future of community sustainable development. In this paper, Puntoon Village community, where the social structure declined and the local population moved out , is taken as a case study. FaanNgukKei, a local non-governmental organization with architectural background in Guangzhou, have conducted participatory urban micro- regeneration experiments in Puntoon community by using the easy-to- understand exhibition as a tool to communicate with the public andparticipants. As a member of FaanNgukkei, the author will show the three stages of the project process in detail: the dissemination of participatory urban micro-regeneration ideas through exhibitions in earlier stage, the future scenario public experiments in the exhibition and community empowerment recently in Puntoon. This method of helping residents regain their sense of community identity and build a sustainable human environment in the community provides a model case for the participatory micro-regeneration of the urban village in China.